Ryokan experience

So yesterday was kind of half wasted. I woke up later than I planned, and then getting my laundry finished so I could check out took forever. Slow dryer. Then I had to wrangle with the airlines and sit on hold forever while they figured out what was going on. Lame. As a result I'm still waiting on a final date of return. I'm trying to change it so it'll be easier for my brother to pick me up, but they can't find my ticket number, the computers can't find flights even though the people running the computers know there are daily ones from Narita to JFK...it's a mess. But I'll keep everybody posted on my arrival info as soon as Lufthansa and United get their acts straightened out.

But that's not the point of this entry. The point is ryokans. They are awesome. Love it. I got in to mine yesterday a little bit before check in time, hoping to drop off my humongously heavy pack, but nobody was there except one very dear, very tiny old lady...who spoke not a single word of English. And me totally reliant on my Japanese phrasebook...it was hilarious. The only part she understood was "I don't speak any Japanese." She understood that. Thought that was great.

Anyway, I dropped off my junk, left a note for the regular staff, and headed out to buy myself a yukata and the gorgeous formal obi I'd been swooning over, then came back. The owner had since come back, and she was the sweetest lady. She was so nice explaining all the workings of a traditional-style inn to me. There sure are a lot of rules...and shoe changes! You wear your own shoes in the entrance hall, slippers in the hallways, toilet slippers in the bathroom, and no shoes at all in your tatami-mat covered room. But she straightened me out as best she could. And she'd lugged my giant heavy bag into my room already. No small feat, since I think I'm getting stress fractures on my feet from lugging it.

The room itself was decent sized. It had a futon mattress on the floor, and a low table with a tea set and hot water thermos on it. It was warm and cozy, with a heated carpet for extra snugnes while curling up on the floor. I made myself a tasty pot of green tea and set about trying on my kimono and yukata (cotton summer kimono). Happiest nerd on the planet.

Then I took a bath. The bath is for the whole house and is kind of like a jacuzzi without the bubbles, so when it's your turn, you wash off first, so you're all clean. Then you get in. It's crazy hot, and even sitting up straight it's up to your neck. Heaven. I just sat there and got all the coldness of that drafty hostel and walking around all day out of my bones. Perfecto! I loved it. Especially since the last time I had a soak was in Cambodia, and the time before that was in my own apartment. It was pure heaven, and I emerged looking slightly like boiled seafood (that is to say, pinker than I went in) and feeling warmer than I have since I got to Kyoto. No more drafty hostel for me! Woohoo!

Then I put my nifty new yukata back on and went back to the best part of a Japanese-style room...the bed! Since it's on the floor, it's really firm, which is awesome for my back, and since it's on a heated floor it's already toasty when you first get in, and since the blanket is almost as thick and heavy as the mattress underneath, you end up warm as toast and comfortably wrapped on all sides in fluffy goodness. Ahhhhhh...

When I woke up in the morning, it was time for my Japanese-style breakfast. Did I say breakfast? I mean break-feast. There was tons of food, I couldn't even contemplate finishing it all. She actually had to make two trips with her tray to bring it all. There was a piece of grilled salmon, a fried egg with bacon (perhaps not traditional?), a seaweed/spinach salad thing with teeny tiny little baby fish in it, miso soup with cabbage, pickled fruit, steamed rice, silky tofu with mushrooms (boiled in a little sterno-fired kettle on my table) and green-onion soy sauce to go with it. And there was something else, but now I've managed to forget what it was. But it was all really tasty. I'll confess I was a little put off by the baby fish things, but I tried them. They gave me the creeps, so I didn't have a lot, but I did eat it. And I may make silky tofu part of my diet at home...but maybe not for breakfast...

All in all, I really had a great time with this. If Japan was as cheap as Laos, I'd stay in places like these every night until I leave, but it'll be back to dorms until I go home. And one capsule hotel the night before I leave for the airport.

So now I'm just killing time waiting for my train. I have to go collect my bags after my day trip to the northwestern corner of the city (huge disastrous disappointment - the garden I wanted to see was closed!!!!). But I have an hour to kill, and it won't take that long to eat a bowl of soba noodles for my late lunch/early dinner, so I'm at the international center in the train station listening to beautiful BBC International and sizing up all the back issues of Newsweek. Paradise! I can't wait to have access to US news any time I want it again...

Oh! But I didn't say what kind of train I was taking, did I? Ah-ha! Yes! A kind we benighted savages in the States never see - the shinkansen! Known to us as the bullet train. I'll be zooming along toward Tokyo at the speed of light or something. I can't wait to try it out. I'll take video if there's still enough light.

My awesome new toy!!

Yay!!! I bought a kimono! It's solid burgundy colored, with a striped lavender obi. The obi isn't super fancy - the girl at the store talked me out of the more formal one, but I may go back and get it and try my hand at the more difficult knot...for 8 bucks, it's worth a try.
Now I just have to figure out how to wear it without looking a complete mess...
And the best part, which I just realized a second ago, is that depending on how the color matches my bedspread, I might be able to hang it up for display in my room!
Yay!

I'm in love...

Dee, your friend was right about me falling desperately in love while I'm overseas...but it's not what you think.

I love Japanese gardens.

There, I've said it. They're fantastic. I'm crazy about them. They're truly 4-season retreats. Even in the wintertime they're gorgeous. The ponds and streams, the artfully placed rocks and pines, the mossy carpet that covers the ground...I love it. I could take or leave the Shinto and Buddhist shrines here (although I saw some pretty amazing ones today), but the gardens are fantastic. I think for my last day in Kyoto tomorrow I'm going to just find out which places have the best gardens in town and go there. Perfect.

Fortunately, I don't have to run away to be with my new love as Dee's friend predicted. There's a fantastic one on Martha's Vineyard, and I'm sure there are others nearby....

I've uploaded some pictures for the past couple weeks today, so feel free to look backward to see them!

Kyoto

Kyoto is such a cute town! It's so atmospheric. I just wandered around Gion about an hour ago (it's the famous geisha neighborhood), and while I didn't see any geisha running around, the buildings were all really cool, and I can only assume that the ones that weren't shops or restaurants were geisha houses, which is kind of cool to think about...so secretive!
Today was a late start, but I went out with a girl who's in my dorm to go see the Imperial Palace and a local shogun's castle. Both were cool, but very modest by Western standards. The rooms are completely empty except for the tatami mats on the floor and the occasional throne. We Westerners associate rulership with mountains and mountains of gold-encrusted, glitzy stuff, so it was a litttle strange to see all these empty rooms, but it occurred to me that anyone who has tried to keep a house from looking cluttered will know that having an completely austere looking room is another form of luxury. Just a different way of looking at things, I guess. The coolest part of the day for me was the gardens (oh, how I want my own garden! I would play with the plants and water features all summer long!) and the "nightingale floor." Japanese gardens are also very austere. No English cottage garden bloom explosion. It's a lot of pine trees and stone and raked gravel with water trickling by, possible filled with brightly colored carp. If you're interested I'm sure there are tons of photos online to see, but the nightingale floor really requires description.

The floor is suspended with clamps and nails that make contact only when a person's weight is over them. The shogun installed the floors all over his castle so that if any sneaky assassins should try to creep up unannounced, the floor would do the announcing for him. When you step on it, the clamp and nail scrape against one another, making a creaking sound that, when many people are walking on it at once, does sound a bit like the warbling of a songbird. Very cool. Jess and I tried to go ninja-style and defeat the floor, but it's impossible, even with the lightest of steps. Very cool. I know my boy students will get a kick out of the notion of watchful samurai waiting behind sliding doors for the slightest midnight creak of the secret floor, bursting out blades a-flashing. It'll be all I can do to keep a couple of the clowns from leaping up and doing some kind of impulsive martial arts farce...you know you're a nerd for teaching when the idea of that makes you smile...

But the big news is that tomorrow, I'm gonna buy a kimono!!! Woohoo! I'm so excited. I don't know how I'll fit it into my bag, but I'll manage somehow. I found this fantastic vintage store with a whole floor full of hundreds of kimono, obi, and all the other things you need to be a true Japanese lady of (secondhand) fashion. I'm so looking forward to trying them on! Yay! I just need to learn how to tie an obi...I plan to wear it when I introduce Japan in class...and every Halloween from now to perpetuity if I end up teaching American history. Yay! I really, really love clothes...especially funky exotic clothes...I can't wait.

Hiroshima

Hi, I'm not exactly sure how long it's been since I posted, but I feel like I dropped off the planet for a while. It probably hasn't been that long, but with lack of sleep it seems like an eternity.

Anyway, I had a blast my last couple days in Beijing, mostly due to my roomies in the hostel. They were three American girls from NY who are in China for a month for a language course, and they were absolutely hilarious. Two of them grew up in West Africa, including one girl who had lived in Ghana as a refugee for a short time, so we shared Ghana stories and had a lot of laughs over that. The three of them were also generally hilarious, so there were long stretches where the whole hostel probably had to listen to us cackling away in our room. Good times all around.

Then I got up crazy early for my flights to Japan. I don't know whether it was the fact that it was a small plane in windy weather or if the pilot was really bad at his job, but it was pretty nerve racking. Nothing really scary, but lots of steep turns and wings dipping up and down. I like a little excitement in a plane trip, but this was more exciting than I was a fan of. And the worst part was that we had a stopover in Dalian before we left China, so after the first "does this pilot know what he was doing" flight, I had to get off the plane, get through immigration, and then get back on voluntarily to do it all again. That's courage, man.

Hiroshima was awesome. The hostel was lovely and snug and warm, and full of really fun people. I arrived at 4 and shortly after I settled in, I asked a guy who was heading out to the grocery store to show me to a decent noodle shop in the neighborhood, so we walked and chatted, and he displayed excellent taste because dinner was delicious. After I ate I headed back to the hostel, and since all the sights are closed after 5, I figured I'd have an exciting night reading the newspaper in the lounge - a for reals paper, incidentally, they don't have the Herald Trib in Laos and China's papers are all censored, so it actually was a little exciting. Anyway, I had not read the first article on Gaza when my dinner guide returns and the lounge fills with a raucous, trash-talking Uno game. It didn't take long for almost a dozen of us to strike up a friendship and decide it was time to hit the town for some serious karaoke. Of course, to protect everybody's anonymity for our bad singing, we all went by nommes de guerre starting with "sister" or "brother." Brother Fury, Sister Phoenix and suchlike, which just added to the hilarity of it all.

Here's how karaoke works in Japan: you get a private room with your buddies so nobody has to see you make a fool of yourself except people who already know you're a fool. You then get to play all the songs you want to sing, and not have to listen through anybody who decides he wants to sing a 20 minute Meatloaf song. Perfect. So we cranked the music and sang until we were hoarse and exhausted, which was approximately 3:30 or 4AM. Our international delegation had excellent taste in music, and I must say, we rocked it out. One thing I love about traveling is how within 5 hours of of your plane touching down in a country you can have a new posse of best friends...

No rest for the wicked, however, because I had a bus ticket at 4PM the next day to get to Kyoto. So I got up at 8:30 and headed to the A-bomb park. After the previous night's frivolities, it was quite sobering. The first thing you see when you get off the bus is the A-Bomb Dome. It used to be the domed agricultural hall, and a major landmark in town. It was right under the hypocenter of the blast, so somehow the steel skeleton of the dome remained while all of its covering and most of the building under it was vaporized. In all those pictures of the blast zone that you see, it's one of two buildings that were left standing in the neighborhood. It has been left as it was on that day as a permanent reminder of the scars that don't heal after an event like that.

After that I went to the Children's Memorial, which is a monument inspired by a girl named Sadako. Most of you who were kids when I was probably read the book about Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes. She was exposed to the blast, and after her initial burns healed, they thought she would go on to lead a healthy life, but several years later she developed leukemia. According to legend, anyone who folds 1000 paper cranes will have their wish granted, and she wanted to live so badly that she started folding. When she hit 1000 and still wasn't cured, she began to make the smallest cranes possible, using a needle to make the folds. Even that was not enough to save her, however, and she eventually died when she should have been attending middle school with her friends. Her schoolmates organized the memorial in honor of her and of all the other children who were killed (hundreds of students were killed instantly in their schools or while they were working on a major public service project in the neighborhood of the hypocenter). The simplicity of the monument almost brought me to tears. It's surrounded by plexiglass boxes filled with cranes sent by children around the world. But the monument itself is just a tower topped with a little girl holding aloft a golden crane. Inside the tower is a bell that people can ring for peace, and watching little kids go up and ring it was really moving...

After that, I went past the flame of peace, which will only be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon in the world is destroyed. Beyond the reflecting pool under the flame is a granite casket holding the name of every victim of the blast, where a small shrine has been set up for people to pray and leave offerings.

Then I went into the museum, which was unbelievably affecting. So much so that despite the number of people there, the place was absolutely silent. There were a lot of material testimonies there. Watches that stopped at the instant of the blast. Children's lunch boxes with the charred remains of lunches never eaten. A tricycle twisted beyond recognition that a little boy had been riding at the time of the blast. A staircase where a person had been sitting at the moment of the blast, with the shadow of that person's outline burned into the concrete by the brightness of the flash. Photos of people wandering in search of help, burned and disoriented - all I can say is thank heavens they were in black and white, because even that was gruesome. And most unspeakable of all, the clothing that people been wearing when the blast hit. I can't explain it, but you can almost see the injuries that the stains and holes in the outfits surrounded. I took a lot of photos in that museum, but I couldn't bring myself to photograph that. It was too awful. Especially the children's clothing. Such tiny garments...

As I walked through, the theme of water continually came up. Radiation and burns leave people desperately thirsty, but with esophageal burns, even a sip of water can be fatal. As word of that got out, those who had escaped injury and were trying to help started to deny the victims water in the hopes of saving them. All the survivor testimonies mention being haunted to this day by the moans of people begging for water that they couldn't give them. When I left the museum, I realized that the park was full of fountains, and that almost all the memorials had water flowing over them. The survivors, in their way, have given the dead the water they could not give them on the day of the blast.

After this, I can think of no reason why a country would ever want to possess nuclear weapons. Why own them if you're not willing to use them, and frankly it would take an absolute lack of conscience to use one, having seen the short- and long-term effects it's had on Hiroshima. I suppose there are countries where conscience doesn't apply, but I feel pretty strongly that America should not be among them.